How I gambled over $1 Billion dollars in my 20’s

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7 Responses

  1. Ben says:

    What a great story! Thank you for sharing! One question, though: I thought gambling winnings were tax free in the UK? Why did you have to pay 45% taxes?

  2. admin says:

    Thanks Ben,
    I believe they are tax-free, but I had to set up a business to deal with the payments. As 1 account might win 100k and the next might lose 10k, so to make sure everyone was paid a fair share I took all the money in and then sent it out. Looking back I should have just let each person withdraw themselves. But I was a young moron and needed the security of knowing I was doing it correctly.

  3. Sam says:

    Unreal mate, wow.

    I guess these Casinos aren’t worth having another crack at? I wonder what will happen with the law changes in the states..

    Great write up, I cant wrap my head around how you spent it all..

  4. admin says:

    Thanks Sam,
    Some people are still doing casino offers and making a decent amount. But nothing like it was before. I don’t think you can do them from Australia anymore.

    America is going to be a goldmine for bonus chasers, but the bookies have learnt from the past, so while it will be lucrative, it won’t be like the early days.

    It’s extremely easy to spend a massive amount of money when you are young and dumb 🙂

  5. Ian says:

    Wow. Just reading that blog was a wild ride. I recently got started with matched betting and am starting to get gubbed. So starting to look for other ways to profit. Hopefully I can find something half as profitable as this.

  6. Marko says:

    It was like watching myself but on a way smaller scale because I never had the guts to make the step. Overall I was enjoying my high school period as no one I know had 😉 .

  7. Beast says:

    Steve

    I’m a very long time reader of the blog but drifted away from it for about the past 5 years. Good to see you got some good numbers on the board in the 10 years. The story about the NFT stuff is just amazing, but shows what you can do when you open your mind and ultimately, recognise the pattern of “the next big thing” early enough and are also smart enough to take profits.

    People just think these things will go up forever but there’s tons of examples of that not being the case.

    This really inspired me to make a comment because we are a similar age (I’m 42 as I write this) and have crossed over in many ways doing what you’ve also done.

    I’m UK based and started on fruit machines before I was of legal age, I got sick of losing pretty quickly after losing every spare ££ I had and I noticed there was a guy in the arcade who definitely seemed to win more than he lost.

    I looked over his shoulder and without it taking too long I went from a net loser to a net winner, in a game where the house edge is 20-30% – it put me through university and I left with a few quid in the bank too. I went on to try professional poker but I had no bankroll management skills and busted out after about 10 months, and went back to a menial bar job and playing machines, which I had moderate success at and won money that was tax free in the UK. It was a rough life though, pubs from opening time, on the feet all day, banned from places, threatened, etc. etc. – never felt long term and stopped being fun. I started playing casino level machines but of course even though you could get an edge, the information was out there and it wasn’t as if you could just go to a big city and expect to clean up in the casinos.

    In 2003 I had a car crash and ruptured all the tendons in my ankle – best thing that ever happened to me because online gambling, which until then I’d only really dabbled in (although my brother was a casino scalper) – I was broke but borrowed money and had doubled that before I got on my feet again. I was happy to quit my job and although something much more interesting came up not soon after, I was confident in going into full-time arbitrage.

    In a couple of years I was gubbed across the board as were my nearest and dearest, and I started a cash betting operation where they couldn’t ban us effectively – my brother was the greatest operative/placer and I did the trading. Between 2006-2010 we absolutely smashed them, particularly Ladbrokes – but because I’d become obsessed with zero-risk, we made much less money than we could have done (and didn’t even think of placing multis until 2008 onwards, which also cost a lot of profit not banked).

    In 2010 the systems changed and bets got limited to 20% of stakes on prices that we wanted, mostly thanks to the famous moneysavingexpert.com epiphany. This destroyed the incentive, my brother went back to uni and took his profits and invested them in property (wise man) and I decided to go full time punting. I ended 2010 with a bang but then lost money in 2011 after considering ops costs and bad debts (I started using commission agents to get on). I also lost money when Pointbet went down, if anyone remembers them.

    2011 persuaded me to get out of the game, but at Cheltenham in 2012 I met a few younger, fresher, next gen punters who had no baggage and were clearing 200k+ per year net. I thought if they could do it, so could I – and after I finished a masters degree I’d signed up to, got back in the game about 6 months after that, but this time focusing on casino properly (I had dabbled in 02 and also 2012) – and the bingo sites were in their heyday. Ridiculously I made more in 2014-15 than I’d ever made before and was regularly playing either roulette or bingo (I’d dabbled with the white label blackjack bots before, but that seemed to be dying off). I had a bespoke bot built and that helped to play blackjack with rebates/loss incentives.

    As the AML net tightened, and moving any money from or to a bookmaker in the UK got very difficult, the towel eventually went in again in 2019 although I’m proud to say the knowledge of markets that I picked up from the arbitrage days led to developing a successful betfair bot with a brilliant statistician, which we’ve developed over the last 5 years and made some good profits with, volatile but passive stuff so very pleasing.

    I don’t think you are ever truly out and I look forward to hearing more about some of the stories above and also how the betting results go! Good luck

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